by Mia Archer
Lisa’s eyes twinkled and I thought I detected the faintest hint of a blush coming to her face as well.
“So if you’re not dressed up for them then why go for more than the T-shirt you had on last weekend?”
Damn. Caught. And now we were right back to where we’d been a few minutes ago with an awkward silence stretching between us. I knew exactly what she was insinuating even as it felt impossible that she could actually be insinuating it. I needed a change of subject, and fast.
“You’re pretty dressed up yourself,” I said. “Not the sort of thing you’d want to wear with certain people around.”
There we go. Turn the tables and call her out! This time I was sure I saw a blush on that pretty face. She was in a bright green tank top and she had on a pair of shorts that were designed to distract. The sort of thing that definitely wouldn’t have passed the “fingertip length” rule for shorts back when we were in school.
“Yeah, well, maybe I wasn’t thinking of Dave when I just threw this on before I came over,” she said. She looked up and locked eyes with me. I almost needed to take a step back from the sheer force of that gaze. Amazing how a few words and a look could go straight to the pit of my stomach which was doing somersaults and twisting into all sorts of awkward knots.
Was this happening? This was happening. There was no doubt what she meant. Was there? I didn’t know. I didn’t have much experience with this sort of thing and I kept thinking about that old unwanted vision of kissing her only maybe it wasn’t as unwanted as I thought it was over the years and now here we were standing so close and I was pretty sure she was hitting on me and it was all too fucking much and what did I…
“This is a pretty nice setup you have here,” she said, looking around and deftly changing the subject. “I’m surprised you weren’t having your games out here the whole time.”
I sighed. Tried to get myself under control. I’m not sure how well it worked. My breathing was still coming pretty hard and heavy and my blood was pumping like I’d just gotten done running between two classes on the opposite end of campus. I was glad for the change of subject, though. There was too much to process here, and it was all coming so fast that I didn’t know what to do.
“Yeah, well, you know how it is,” I said, looking pointedly across the room to Dave who was complaining loudly to Travis that the name brand chips I bought didn’t taste as good as the cheap stuff he had.
Lisa sighed. “Yeah, I wanted to warn you about that. I think he’s going to try and make you miserable tonight. He was pretty mad on the ride over here.”
“You rode over here with him?” I asked.
“Well yeah. Who else could I get a ride from?”
“I would’ve been happy to pick you up,” I said.
I tried not to sound too eager as I said that, but I don’t think it worked. Lisa blushed and looked away and once again I was left feeling that I’d said the wrong thing. What was it about her that inspired me to constantly put my foot in my mouth like that?
“I didn’t have your number,” she said. “And we never really ran in the same circles so…”
“Well we can fix that right now,” I said, feeling dizzy and not quite believing I was doing this. “Give me your phone.”
I don’t know why this felt weird. Maybe because this was Lisa we were talking about? I’d exchanged digits with plenty of girls over the years and it never meant anything, so why was I freaking out now?
Because here, with Lisa, it meant more. Damn. What was happening to me? I was going to have to face this down sooner rather than later. I tapped my phone number into her phone and handed it back over.
“There. Now you can get in touch with me if you ever need anything,” I said.
I had a few ideas of what “anything” entailed, but I didn’t want to get into that now. From the way she smiled and bit her lip it seemed she might’ve caught the totally intended but unintended double meaning of what I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Are these mushrooms on this pizza?” Dave shouted from the other side of the room, breaking up any moment that might have been developing. Typical.
“I can’t have mushrooms! I’m allergic!”
Dave started gagging as though he was having trouble breathing. That had to be the world’s quickest allergic reaction. Especially considering it didn’t look like he’d even taken a bite of pizza. He was just staring down at it with a panicked look as his face turned several shades of red.
Travis rolled his eyes. “You’re not allergic to mushrooms. Your mom uses that in her spaghetti recipe all the time and you love it.”
Arnold chose that moment to step into the room. I sighed and rolled my eyes. Already I could tell it was going to be one of those nights. Then again I’d known it would be one of those nights as long as there was the remotest possibility Dave would show up.
“Okay, so if we could stop faking injuries and get over to the game table?” I said loud enough to be heard through the whole room.
Everyone looked up and started gathering their food and moving over to the table. Good. It was nice to know they could sort of follow orders. Maybe this night wouldn’t be so bad after all. I felt a chill and shivered even as I thought that, as though it was tempting fate in a very bad way.
12: Dungeon Crawl
Lisa:
We moved silently through a dark and mysterious dungeon. Well, sort of silently. Kylie said that all the armor the guys were wearing made a lot of noise and we were going to attract all sorts of monsters if we kept up. I guess that was the opposite of silent.
I was strangely excited at the idea of running into those monsters, though. This was nuts. I never would’ve thought I was into this sort of thing. I never thought I’d be more excited about playing a dorky game like this than I was at the idea of going out and getting my drink on with friends, and yet here we were.
“I want to move my character over next to Lisa’s,” Dave said. He moved down and put his hand on the grid paper Kylie busted out as soon as the game really got started.
“What are you doing, Dave?” Kylie asked. “We aren’t even in the middle of combat. No one is using the grid yet.”
“I don’t care. I want my character to be next to Lisa’s. I want to be able to protect m’lady if something dangerous this way comes,” he said, flashing me a grin that was probably supposed to be seductive, but it didn’t do anything for me.
Kylie rolled her eyes. “Fine. If it’s that important to you then you’re walking down the dark and dangerous corridor next to Lisa’s wizard to protect her.”
I frowned as I looked at that grid paper with Dave’s character next to mine. I knew this was just a game, but at the same time that character felt like an extension of me. I felt protective of her. And I felt like it was bad enough having Dave hitting on me in the real world. I really didn’t want him to get in the habit of hitting on me in the fake world too.
It reminded me of a guy I was partnered with on the squad back during my junior year of high school. The guy seemed convinced that us being partners meant we had to fall in love and start dating. It had taken complaining to the coach and switching partners to finally get across to him that I wasn’t interested.
Maybe it was time to go to extreme measures now, too, to get the point across to Dave.
“Can I threaten a fireball when he gets too close to me?” I asked.
Kylie smiled, then tried to hide that smile behind some coughing when Dave looked up at her. Yeah, she liked the idea. She just didn’t want to show it.
“You can do whatever you want, Lisa,” Kylie said.
Travis and Arnold both laughed as I locked eyes with Dave. “Fine. I hold out my hand and a fireball appears ready to be thrown when he gets too close to me.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Dave spluttered.
“Get away from me,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Dave crossed his arms and leaned back in a pout. “Fin
e. I move away from her.”
“The character on the grid?” I asked.
Kylie helpfully reached out and moved Dave’s character, a little metal figure that was fancier than the colored dots the rest of us used, back to where it had been a moment ago.
“Good. Glad we got that out of the way,” Kylie said. “Now if we could please get back to the game?”
“I don’t know why we’d want to get back into the stupid game,” Dave muttered. “Walking down a cave at the bottom of a dungeon? Hardly an original idea.”
“It’s about as original as all the times you had us go up scary abandoned towers fighting zombies,” Arnold chimed in.
“Shut up guys,” Dave said. “Table talk again and I’m docking you XP!”
“Um, you can’t do that,” Kylie said. “I’m the one running the game, remember? And they can chat all they want.”
“Yeah, what about that time you had the dungeon filled entirely with all the most attractive female creatures you could find in the manual?” Travis said. “I think that was lamer than this.”
“Seriously,” Arnold piped in. “If we wanted to read bad erotica there’s plenty of that on the Internet without hearing about how your stand-in character made all the sexy magical creatures instantly…”
“Shut up!” Dave shouted, slamming his hand down on the table. His face had turned several different shades of red and he was constantly glancing in my direction. I covered my mouth so my smile wouldn’t be so obvious.
“Right, so are we going to play this game or not?” Kylie asked.
“Fine,” Dave muttered. “Wouldn’t kill us to fight a dragon or something, though.”
“Yeah, well part of the reason you’re not DM anymore, aside from you being a total asshole, is that you were always giving us the same three scenarios that ended with us storming some castle to fight a dragon,” Kylie said.
“Seriously,” Travis muttered. “If I wanted the Shrek experience I could just watch the movie.”
Kylie cleared her throat. “Now if we could get on with MY game?”
I sighed. This wasn’t as much fun as I’d hope it would be, what with all the arguing and everything. It seemed Dave just couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t the one running the show, and that was going to be a problem if the game kept up like this with all these stupid interruptions. I wanted to reach across the table and smack some sense into him, but even a smack would probably be enough contact to make him think I was interested in him or something.
“Okay, so you’re all walking down a dark corridor when you come to a fork in the road. You feel a breeze carrying an unpleasant smell coming from the corridor on the right, and you hear something that sounds like movement down the corridor to the left,” Kylie said.
I looked down at the crude map Kylie had drawn over the past week showing a fork in the road. I closed my eyes and imagined myself deep in some cave, that gave me a chill because I always hated being in enclosed spaces like that, staring down two potentially dangerous possibilities. This was so much fun!
“What do you think we should do?” Travis asked.
“I think we should go for the bad smell,” I said. “That might just be something rotting down that corridor. I don’t think we want to run into whatever’s making noise down here.”
“Yeah, but what if the thing that made that stuff rotting in the first place is still down that corridor too?” Arnold asked. “Might be better to go the other direction. At least that way we know there’s something we can face down.”
“Come on you guys,” Dave said. “It’s obvious we need to go down the corridor where all the noises are coming from. This is classic Dungeon Master misdirection. She wants us to go for the smelly corridor with the breeze because there’s going to be something big and dangerous to smash us to bits down there.”
“No, you’re thinking about how you’d do it,” Travis said.
“Come on you guys. No meta-gaming at my table,” Kylie said, fixing Dave in particular with a very nasty look.
“What? We’re just talking about the game and trying to come to a decision!” Dave said.
“What’s meta-gaming?” I asked.
Kylie smiled at me and I melted. It was a small smile, but any small sign of affection from her was enough to give me chills. In a good way.
“It’s when someone uses knowledge their character couldn’t possibly have to try and win the game,” she said. “For example, Dave here trying to figure out the game’s challenge based on what he thinks I’m going to do rather than trying to figure it out based on how his character would react to the situation.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess that makes sense. So it’s sort of cheating?”
“It’s not cheating,” Dave barked. “It’s just playing the game smart.”
Kylie rolled her eyes. She seemed to be doing that a lot whenever Dave spoke. I was going to have to see if I could get a ride home with her later, because I did not want to deal with having to get a ride home with him.
“Whatever,” Dave said. “I’m going down the corridor where we hear all the noises. You guys can do whatever you want.”
“Wait! You can’t just do that without us,” I said.
“I can’t?” Dave said. “Watch me.”
“Can I fire an arrow at him? Please?” Arnold said.
“You can do whatever you want,” Kylie said. “I’m not saying whether or not that’s a good idea, though.”
“Could we cut the crap and you just tell me what happens when my character walks down the hall?”
“Fine,” Kylie said. “Your funeral. You walk down a short corridor with a slight bend. When you go around the bend you see a faint light up ahead of you, and you step into a massive chamber with torches set in the wall all around. You’ve found some evidence of a subterranean civilization. Now all of you roll for initiative.”
“Damn it Dave,” Travis said. “If you got our party killed before we even had a chance to play more than one night of this game…”
“Roll for initiative?” I said, looking down at all my papers. I’d heard those words last weekend, but I didn’t remember what it meant.
Kylie reached out and took a twenty-sided die she’d loaned me. She dropped it in my hand, her fingers brushing against my palm for the briefest of moments causing the hair to stand up on my arm. I suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with being trapped in an imaginary cave.
“This here,” Kylie said. “Roll it to see when your turn comes up in combat.”
My eyes went wide. “Combat? You mean our guys are being attacked?”
“Sure are,” Kylie said with a grin.
I looked across the table to Dave and stuck my tongue out at him. He saw and rolled his eyes, apparently not giving a crap that I was less than pleased at him getting us in trouble. When he got into this game he seemed to forget everything about the real world, including how much he was trying to impress me.
Kylie narrated the “combat” with a breathless quality that made me feel like I was right there in some massive cave deep underground fighting goblins. I imagined them looking sort of like the puppets from that old movie with that blond rock star dude playing the goblin king creeping on some girl. It’d been years since I saw the movie and I couldn’t remember much aside from what those puppets looked like.
A couple of goblins swarmed around Dave, but Travis and Arnold moved in just in time to save him from being killed in the first round. I stepped in and tried to fire off spells from a distance, but Kylie told me I only had so many and I should probably keep some of them back in case I needed to defend myself. That prompted Dave to remember that he was trying to impress me and he moved in close to my character so he could “defend her honor.”
Kylie glanced at me when Dave pulled that move. “So do you want to use that fireball now or not?”
I glanced down at the grid representing our characters in combat. I was tempted to go ahead and use that on Dave. Prove to him that I didn’t need hi
s help, but I was surrounded and it seemed like it might be a good idea to take his help. Just this once. As much as that annoyed me.
“No, I’m good,” I said.
“Okay then,” Kylie said. “You’re all in the middle of fighting the goblins when you hear a mighty roar from the other side of the room and a massive goblin decked out in gold and jewels steps into the light bearing a human-sized sword that looks massive in his small goblin hands.”
“Oh shit!” Dave said. “I’m totally taking that guy out!”
And just like that his character was gone. That wouldn’t have bothered me too much, except for what came out of Kylie’s mouth next.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” she asked. “You’re going to leave Lisa open to a flanking attack from that monster you were blocking.”
“Whatever,” Dave said. “I need that sweet loot and XP!”
The jerk! I watched helplessly as his character move across the room leaving me all alone and feeling pretty squishy on my end of the board with nothing but my magic spells to protect me from a big bad goblin that suddenly stood in my path. It was difficult to be too worried since in my mind’s eye I was imagining a thing that looked more like a muppet than a terrifying creature straight out of my nightmares, but I knew my character was in trouble.
“Okay then,” Kylie said. “The goblin in front of Lisa raises it’s weapon and…” Kylie rolled some dice a few times and I squeezed my eyes shut waiting for the disaster to hit. There was no way I was getting out of this one with my character intact. Amazing how quickly I could feel so close to a person who didn’t even exist.
“The goblin trips over a rock it didn’t see on the ground and falls flat on its face in front of you giving you an attack of opportunity, Lisa,” Kylie said with a thin smile that she wiped from her face the moment everyone else around the table turned to look at her.
Something just happened, but I was new enough to the game that I had no idea what any of that meant. It might as well be Japanese or something for all I understood it.
“Does that mean my character lives or something?” I asked.
